Wikirank Shows You What’s Hot on Wikipedia

The amount of data we can harvest from the web is positively staggering, and we’re just now beginning to get a sense of what’s possible if we boil that data down into small chunks that are easy to digest with the eyes alone.

Take Wikirank, for example, a new data visualization site for tracking trends on Wikipedia that launched Thursday. The simple tool exposes how often a specific Wikipedia page has been viewed, and graphs those pageviews over time. It also lets you compare different topics on Wikipedia to see which is more popular.

The graphs are clean and simple, like sparklines. More importantly, the site is easy to use and easy to understand. URLs are human-readable and easy to hack. There’s also a tool for building page comparisons.

The new website lets you generates charts like this, comparing the popularity of the Wikipedia pages of four monsters of 70s arena rock.Screenshot: Wikirank

Sites like Alexa let you do this for websites by tracking visitor traffic at the domain name level, but Wikirank is more specific. It shows actual views of specific page. The data comes from Wikistats, a public dump of server logs for Wikipedia, which itself is open and totally transparent — Wikipedia’s data is reusable under the GNU free documentation license.

Wikirank looks a bit like Google Analytics, and with good reason. The project was developed by a core four-person team at Small Batch software, one of which is former Analytics honcho Jeffrey Veen.

Veen, who also used to work at Wired.com, points out in his blog post announcing the release that Wikirank’s launch was timed to coincide with the anniversary of the invention of the wiki.

More from Veen:

One of the great things about the web is how measuring tiny behaviors reveals patterns that tell stories. The data we get from Wikipedia is no different; as we started playing around with the numbers, we saw loads of interesting shapes emerge in the charts.

For example, big news stories show up as dramatic spikes where there there was no data before. When the astounding story broke that an airliner had made an emergency landing in the Hudson, a page was created on Wikipedia within minutes. Over the next two days, that page was one of the most popular on the site.